Missionary Badge Pocket

I was desperate to share this post before Fathers day so that others could do it, but alas as I was giving this gift to my hubby, I had to wait.....but hey there's still upcoming birthdays, Christmas, returning missionaries etc. that it would be great for.

This was another idea inspired from General Conference (April 2013), it was from a talk given by Neil L. Andersen entitled It's a Miracle where he said....

And returned missionaries, find your old missionary tag. Don’t wear it, but put it where you can see it. The Lord needs you now more than ever to be an instrument in His hands. All of us have a contribution to make to this miracle.

It took me all of 5 minutes to make this gift, especially as I got lucky and found my hubby's missionary badge right at the top of the first memory box I opened :)

I simply got one of my sons shirts and cut around the pocket, leaving enough excess material so that I could wrap it around the back of the glass in the frame....sorry about the photo quality but this was being done late at night, whilst trying to be quiet and quick about it!  There's nothing like the last minute rush!??!!

I didn't attach the material to the glass as I thought I could then take it off and wash it if needs be...as I slipped the badge on I got all choked up, it looked really lovely for more reasons than one.  I hope that my three sons will be inspired by seeing it daily around our home and that they too will choose to serve a mission when they are older. 

I'm thinking that I might make a frame for each of my boys with their names and the phrase 'I hope they call me on a mission' printed on the shirt pocket where their badges would be, so that we would end up with a wall of frames.  Then when they've served their missions they too can put their badge up as a reminder to themselves and us all to be missionary minded at all times.

For Peace at Home

I can't believe it's been two months since Conference, time is just flying by!!?!  I loved conference and didn't know where to start with the things I've learnt and the FHE's and activities that we've got planned....soooo excited, can you tell??!?  We decided to start with Elder Richard G. Scott's talk entitled 'For Peace at Home'.

As Elder Scott spoke the words below in his talk an image popped into my head and I sketched it down in my notebook so that I wouldn't forget.

I’m sure you can identify the fundamental principles that center your home on the Savior. The prophetic counsel to have daily personal andfamily prayer, daily personal and family scripture study, and weekly family home evening are the essential, weight-bearing beams in the construction of a Christ-centered home. Without these regular practices it will be difficult to find the desired and much-needed peace and refuge from the world.

I'm still not super duper at doing graphic images but I'm good at sharing (lol) and hopefully getting better at it as I go?!!  Well this is what I came up with.

to download file

click here

We used this talk as our guide tonight for FHE, there was sooo much in the talk that we could focus on, and I didn't want to leave any of it out, so I broke it up into smaller bite size chunks/topics so that the kids could take it all in.

I stuck a picture of the Saviour in the centre of a piece of paper and after we had read each of the quotes from the talk, we discussed them and then wrote on the paper what we could do to make Christ the centre of our home.

This is now stuck on our kitchen door as a reminder of what we are going to try to do to make our home more peaceful (here's hoping!!) and Christ centered.

For the activity at the end of the lesson, everyone got a strawberry lace and we put a big bowl of Cheerios in the middle of us all.  One by one we had to say something that made us 'cheery' (aka happy), and then we could put one cheerio on our lace...we set a time limit of 5 minutes to do it, so everyone was trying to think of things to say as quickly as they could.

It started off well with the kids saying things and quickly threading on their Cheerio so that they were ready for their next go.  It was only as we were half way through the game that the older kids noticed that every time they were saying something my three year old was repeating it and handing a Cheerio to his dad to thread on...hence his lace had lots more than the others, then everybody just went for it and shouted out lots of 'cheery' things with no waiting this time...it was really funny, and we had such good giggle at it all.

I really enjoyed the lesson and game tonight, but more so the game...it wasn't particularly peaceful, but hopefully we heard some of the things that makes others in our family happy, and will look for ways to make them cheery in the future.  Playing the game was easy, but the further it went on, the harder it got...but as I heard some of my children's answers it made me reflect on lots of wonderful things in my life that have brought me so much happiness and joy.  We are all so blessed in so many different ways, we've just got to stop, look and think and we will find things that make us 'cheery', no matter what our circumstances  :)